Twenty years ago, in 1994, filmmaker Kimberly Peirce was a down-on-her-luck 27-year-old film student at Columbia University. Living in an enclave of artists, intellectuals, and queers in Manhattan's East Village, she lagged behind on rent; her unpaid phone line was cut and she'd already depleted her life savings. According to a recent cover story in Columbia Magazine, she didn't even have the funds to retrieve the raw footage of her first film from DuArt, a local processing center on West 55th Street in midtown.

Luckily, independent producer Christine Vachon (Kill Your Darlings, Happiness, Kids) swooped in, along with support from the Sundance Institute and Hart Sharp Entertainment, helping Peirce bring transman Brandon Teena to life in what became, five years later, her breathtaking debut, Boys Don't Cry.

It's been two decades since the brutal rape and murder of Brandon Teena. And while we've made significant strides in trans awareness and visibility since then, some media mavens— Katie Couric and Piers Morgan—fail to cover transgender issues with a nuanced understanding and sensitivity.

Peirce's theories about why transgender people unsettle some might explain why. And who better to ask? She dedicated five years of her life to researching and filming her 1999 dramatization of Brandon Teena's heartbreaking story. It garnered numerous awards, including a Golden Globe and Oscar for its lead actress, the incomparable Hilary Swank, and last year, Outfest, the prestigious LGBT film festival, honored Peirce with the 17th Annual Outfest Achievement Award for her beautifully daring work.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Brandon's passing, Peirce spoke to me from her L.A. office. Fresh off a whirlwind press junket for her latest directorial effort, a remake of Steven King's Carrie, she eloquently mused on queer culture and politics—and how Brandon might have fared in today's world.

We've made important progress since 1993. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in 2011, allowing gays to serve openly in the military; DOMA was ruled unconstitutional last year, granting gays the right to wed. Has queer culture gone mainstream?I think it's great that gay people can get married, but I am also very open to the idea that all people get the rights and benefits that marriage offers even if they are not married. I know a lot of queer people, including myself, who find our experience of queer culture has been a powerful and formative part of our lives, and we don't want to lose that as queer life gains acceptance in the mainstream. I'd like to see all people have their civil rights protected regardless of their gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, sexual preference, etc.

Do you think our cultural comfort with transgenderism has changed since 1993?I certainly see more trans visibility. Even the queer movement changed its name from GL to GLBTQ. I know more people who are living openly as either transmen or transwomen. Some are choosing to physically transition using surgery and hormones. Some aren't. And there seems to be more trans visibility in mainstream culture, which can mean more family members are learning about trans issues. My family members and their friends may not have known trans people or seen them represented or depicted in pop culture before 1993, but if they're consuming pop culture now, they're probably seeing more trans people and more realistic depictions of trans people—Chaz Bono on Dancing With the Stars, Laverne Cox on Orange Is the New Black. That said, there is still work to be done. I would push to keep improving awareness and sensitivity.

Why do you think trans people unsettle some people so much?Gender identity can be a profound thing for many of us. We may have a gender. We may have multiple genders. Yet, we have a society that suggests there are only two genders, that assigns us one of those two genders and tends to suggest we stay put in the one we are originally assigned to. Society can place expectations on how we, as a "male" or as a "female," should dress, cut our hair, talk, and behave. It's encoded in our language. Unless you're calling someone by their name, it's very hard to refer to them without "gendering them." Even the law and our jobs treat us differently as either men or women.

Given all these expectations put on us regarding gender, it's not surprising that some people might be unsettled by someone who they think doesn't fit into that simple binary. A person might be unsettled because they find that person threatens the simplicity and comfort they get from being one of only two genders.

Another reason a person might be unsettled is because they have their own transgender feelings. They might feel they are not the perfect girl or the perfect boy, so when they see somebody venturing into this area that perhaps they're curious about they may feel pressured to explore it. They might feel threatened they are going to be exposed.

Arthur Dong made a great documentary called Licensed to Kill, which I studied when I was making Boys Don't Cry. He asked a number of men who were in prison for having killed gay men why they committed this crime. Many of the men interviewed revealed scenarios where they had felt desire for gay men, had lured them into situations or entered into situations where they could explore their desire, and then they killed these gay men. It was heartbreaking. It seemed to me these men who killed gay men did so because after satisfying their desire, they were terrified of their desire being exposed to these men, to themselves, and to others. So they destroyed the thing (these gay men) that revealed their desire.

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How might the cultural shifts we've seen over the last 20 years have influenced Brandon's perception of himself?With access to the Internet, Brandon Teena would have seen and known a lot more about queerness and transgender identities. Brandon did research about having sexual reassignment surgery, so I would imagine, 20 years later, he would have seen images and videos of butch lesbians and trans men and trans women talking openly about their feelings about their gender identity and about their desire to transition or not. He might have seen self-made videos of people dressing in their preferred identity and/or transitioning. He could have seen a doctor's presentation on how a surgery might be done.

In writing the script for Boys Don't Cry, we asked ourselves, 'Why did Brandon who lived in the relatively large and cosmopolitan city of Lincoln, Nebraska [population: 265,000] not go to New York City or San Francisco, which he likely would have thought had greater queer culture and out populations? Why did he choose to move to the much smaller, less cosmopolitan town of Falls City [population: 9,000]?' We concluded that he stayed in a place that was familiar and where there were fewer queer people because that environment made it easier to pass as a man. So while Brandon Teena twenty years later would likely have been more knowledgeable of queer culture, if he did not want to move into a queer life and instead wanted to disappear into a straight life, he may still have made the same choice to go to Falls City. And while the people that he hung out with in Falls City twenty years later may also have had some more knowledge of queerness, they may have been no more accepting of it. I never thought Falls City was the problem. I always imagined it was the people Brandon sought out and fell in with. If he had chosen more tolerant people, he may have had a different outcome.

From what I've read it didn't seem he wanted to assert a queer identity?In all my research of Brandon Teena, from interviews with people who had met him and loved him, to reading his journal entries and listening to tapes of him, I concluded that he did not seem to make moves to present as queer or to identify as a lesbian. He did make moves to live as a straight guy in a relatively straight world, dating women and being buddies with the guys. That is why I had him say in the movie, "I'm not a fucking dyke," and why he stays in Falls City to pursue Lana and befriend John and Tom. However, I read in his diary that he wondered what it would be like to be a girl. That led me to believe that while he wanted to be a straight man, he also had a curiosity about his female bodied-ness. The tragedy for me is that Brandon's life was cut short and that he was denied the chance to explore these questions about himself.

I noticed that while you mostly refer to Brandon with male pronouns, you also sometimes use female pronouns to identify him. Why?Out of sheer respect for Brandon who called himself a "he," fashioned himself in a masculine way, and used a masculine name, "Brandon," I feel it's right to refer to him accordingly. If he presented himself as purple, I would call him purple. Two things about Brandon though: We do not know where he was going. He may have ended up anywhere along a gender continuum—he may have identified as a masculine butch woman, he may have ended up a transsexual man, or something else altogether. I love the boy that Brandon fashioned himself into and the boy Brandon believed he was. And because even after Brandon was living as a man, he seemed to express curiosity about his girl self, I came to be curious about and love the girl that for me continued to be a part of that boy. I want to be careful here. I don't want transsexuals to think that I'm saying that the gender they become is not ultimately who they are. I am trying to express that I saw and related to multiple layers of Brandon's identity, because I felt he related to multiple layers of his identity.

Can you talk a little about your personal story, how it intersected with Brandon's and how it helped you tell his story?I definitely run the gamut: I've been feminine, I've been tomboyish, I've been straight. I'm currently engaged to a woman. I am pretty open-minded. I relate to Brandon's desire and his audacity for living as he needed and wanted to live. I've been attracted to beautiful women as Brandon was. I'm a performer. I like to wear a nice suit or a tux. My family is from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a small, working class town. I've known physical and sexual violence and I felt that that violence killed off parts of myself. I've also seen betrayals up close. There were things in my life that intersected with Brandon's story that enabled me to get inside of it in ways that were unique and truthful.

Is that the reason you've made so few films since this one—'Stop-Loss' (2008) and 'Carrie' (2013)—because it's hard to find stories that speak to you like this one?I'd like to kind of turn that question around. As a woman director, having made three feature films, and two shorts, I'm doing pretty well statistically. There is a statistical reality to how few movies women get to make. Only about five person of working feature directors are women. Whenever a woman makes a movie we should be saying, "Great, a woman made a movie! Let's see the next one." In a The New York Times profile of me, Amy Pascal, the co-chairman of Sony Pictures, makes a very astute comment on this issue. She says the movie industry is "institutionalized not to support women, even if a lot of us are trying to change it…." We need women to make more movies. The only way that's going to happen is if we help them.

Is 'Boys Don't Cry' the film you are most proud of?In many ways, Brandon was my first great love. I've longed to love a character as much as I loved him. I've loved some things that I've created, but I don't know that I've found the relationship that I had with him. I truly felt that I knew him. I felt he was with me. When the movie was done, I felt our time together was complete and it was time for him to leave. I was alone without him. I long for that level of commitment, love, and connection from a character. There were times when I regretted that I hadn't yet found something as great as Brandon. But then I thought: You have to feel lucky he entered your life and you got a chance to tell his story and move people.

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